Is my front door open?

Friday, April 19th, 2024 at 08:04pm

My interest in home automation has always been more around monitoring than automation, and also doing it locally. I have never felt the need to be able to turn lights on and off via my phone when I am at home, let along if I am away from home. However there have been a couple of times when I have wanted to check on something remotely.

I was not going to expose my home assistant instance to the world and I didn’t want to set up a permanent remote access method, however I remembered that my home router is WRT based and can run an OpenVPN server. I can then install the OpenVPN client on my phone or laptop, giving me remote access to my network (so not just home assistant) if I needed it.

Right now I am in a hotel room in Gladstone, Queensland. The second Everything Open conference ended yesterday (hopefully I will write up a report on that soon) but I do not fly home until tomorrow. So it was a bit confusing to get a phone call from my neighbour, asking if I was home early, because my front door was wide open…

That is not a good thing to hear, so I asked them to cautiously investigate as they have a key. They found that the laundry screen door and door were both still locked, there was no signs of disturbance. The front screen door was still locked and despite being open the front deadlock was still deadlocked.

My first flight of the day to head up to Gladstone had been at 6am, so I had left home at 4am. My best theory is that as I was locking the doors in the dark that I didn’t quite pull the front door enough and it didn’t latch, then strong wind a few days later was enough to open it all the way.

Since I could now VPN in and bring up the home assistant interface I was able to see when my neighbour opened the laundry door, but I had no monitoring of the other doors.

The sensor on the laundry door is a reed switch connected to the arduino that is also monitoring the temperature in the laundry and also the outside temperature. There is power nearby so I don’t have to worry about batteries. There is no power convenient to my front door (or other similar locations) so I have been thinking about something battery powered. An arduino uses to much power, but maybe it is time to look into Zibgee or Z-Wave devices?

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